March of this year, we considered a letter from a mysterious “John,” who detailed several physical remnants of the original church persisting to the new 1912 building. One of John’s pieces was the Memorial Chapel altar. John’s letter says that “the altar in the North Transept came from the old church and was stored down in the furnace room of the present building until Canon Oliver found it there after the transept was built and put it back in use.” But was he right?
Read MoreOn January 16th, 1949, St. Matthias’ 11am service was neither Eucharist nor Morning Prayer, but a solemn service of dedication…
Read MoreSt. Matthias’, like many Protestant churches in Canada, is covered in memorials to dead soldiers, many in their late teens or early twenties. Whether you’ve read a plaque, looked up at a stained-glass window, or taken a moment to peruse the honour roll in the Memorial Chapel, it’s hard to avoid the reminders of what, and whom, this parish lost during the World Wars. The desire to memorialise these boys coincided with two important aspects of St. Matthias’ life from the 1920s through the 1960s…
Read MoreBy the early 1970s, the St. Matthias’ Association of Women had expanded to include enough subsidiary groups that they occupied over half the page count of each year’s annual report, had financial statements as long as those of the church proper, and were getting a little tired of being ignored when it came to church governance…
Read MoreIn July of 1949, then-rector Rev. Gilbert Oliver set out for England to take a well-deserved vacation, and, while he was there, to see about recruiting a young curate to become his assistant. The recruitment was ultimately unsuccessful, but the vacation, the first that we have on record, was part of a larger move through the 1940s to see our clergy as needing more than just their stipends…
Read MoreLast week, St. Matthias’ celebrated our patronal festival and 150 years of worshipping together! In many ways, our 150th service and parish party were quite different than past anniversary services – both liturgically and in terms of participation – but Matthians who attended anniversaries past would still have had quite a lot they could recognise.
Read MoreWhen we look into the past, an important question is whose eyes we are seeing through. In the case of documents like letters and annual reports, often we know the author and in many cases we can put together some salient facts about their lives that allow us to understand their perspective. With art, we are somewhere in between: we often know the artist’s identity and can make educated guesses about their perspective, but it is easy to think of visual representations as somewhat objective …
Read MoreWhat’s in a bulletin? This week’s snippet from our archives zooms in on the bulletin from the 75th building anniversary to uncover the ways in which a single small document can carry within it quite a large number of stories…
Read MoreAs Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Queen Victoria was the highest authority to which the new congregation of St. Matthias’ owed allegiance. In fact, if St. Matthias’ had been founded about twenty years earlier, it would have had an even more direct line to the monarchy, since the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada was only granted autonomy as an ecclesiastical province in the 1850s. Next week, when Charles III is coronated, he will take up the mantle of Defender and Governor of Anglicanism…
Read MoreThe morning of April 28th, 1912 dawned cold and clear after an unseasonably warm but cloudy Saturday. Matthians on their way to church would have donned their hats and gloves, made sure their prayerbooks were in hand, and then set foot for the first time into a service held in the building they’d been dreaming about for over twenty years. Their service of morning prayer would have been rather different than ours…
Read MoreToday’s St. Matthias’ choristers get their weekly assignments via email (and whiteboard), but they otherwise aren’t all that different from the assignments of the 1930s and 1940s…
Read MoreOn April 12th, 2020, 78 separate devices (phones, computers, and tablets) logged on to St. Matthias’ Easter Morning Zoom service, a month after the only pandemic service that St. Matthias’ cancelled. Those 78 connections…
Read MoreIt took a lot of people a lot of dreaming to get to this moment in 1910. The original church, built in 1875, was no longer big enough to fit the approximately 80 families who were members of the church by 1892, nor did it have electric lights or a suitable organ…
Read MoreReading lessons and welcoming people into the church are two tasks that have been with St. Matthias’ as long as we’ve been a “we”! Each piece of scripture read and each bulletin handed out or collection plate circulated is the result of slowly evolving traditions…
Read MoreIn an October 1973 letter to Archdeacon Jack Doidge, someone who signs himself only “John” chides the Archdeacon for misrepresenting St. Matthias’ history to the Montreal Gazette. “You are not correct,” he writes, “when you say that it [the old bell] is all that is left from the old church.” John, who was a member of the 1962 committee organising the 50th anniversary celebrations of the new building and who had been one of the last baptisms in the old building in 1910…
Read MoreThe St. Matthias’ Annual Vestry Meeting is this Sunday! In lieu of a regular blog post, we’ve compiled a list of Vestry Attendance Dos and Don’ts, based on some curiosities from past Vestry minutes and attendance sheets…
Read MoreIn the 1880s and 90s, when Vestry was still held at Easter (no wonder there were sometimes only a dozen or so attendees!), financial reporting was fairly simple. St. Matthias’ was still a small church, and the entire balance sheet for the year could fit on a single page…
Read MoreIn January 1938, then-rector Rev. Gilbert Oliver complained in his report to Vestry that “whereas there were over 700 families in the Parish who look upon St. Matthias as their church, approximately only 400 families are regular attendants, and only about half of those families attending bear their share of the expense.” It was not the first such complaint from a Rector or a Warden, nor would it be the last, but in Rev. Oliver’s case, concern about attendance may have been exacerbated by an issue in the parish that had been ongoing since before his appointment a decade previous…
Read MoreAfter the new church building was finished in 1912, St. Matthias’ occupied two buildings on their single property: the old church, and the one we now call home. But in 1933, a stray comment at the Annual Vestry meeting about the difficulty the Sunday School was having trekking back and forth between buildings started a conversation that would grow, in two short years, into the hall where Miss Vicky’s now welcomes Westmount’s pre-schoolers…
Read MoreThings at St. Matthias’ haven’t always been as serious as vestry meetings, financial reports, and lost bells. The parish has a long and vibrant history in the arts – our choir, of course, and the succession of organs, but also operettas, fashion shows, and Christmas pageants…
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